Beth Wills

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I have not, nor have I ever been able to take classes, travel to seminars or belong to neighborhood quilting clubs or quilds. I worked the night shift and had “days off” during the week. No one wanted to teach me to quilt or give a class at 3:00 AM when I was awake and sewing through my “day off”. So, I read magazines, books and more books. With the advent of the internet and YouTube, learning to quilt on your own would be a more manageable task. When I first started, I was all by myself – making lots of mistakes and making lots and lots of quilts for my family. Getting old is not for the faint of heart! Having old joints before your time is not so much fun either. As it became more painfully clear that crawling around on the floor to baste a quilt was no longer possible I started to look at alternative methods to “keep on quilting”. My first foray into frame quilting was with a popular wooden frame on which I put a great sewing machine with a “huge” 9 inch throat. I also at this time, introduced myself to computer assisted quilting. It didn’t take too long before I figured out that this gorgeous machine with the 9” throat was going to give me approximately 4” of quilting space once the finished quilt roll began to take up some of the space in the throat of that machine. I made a LOT of quilts with that particular set-up. I made lots and lots of those 4” passes of the machine, each and every pass wishing I had a machine with a larger throat. And, because I was having so much fun with the computer assisted end of frame quilting, I knew that I needed a larger machine that had computer guided capabilities. I spent hours dreaming about gorgeous feathers and other elegant edge to edge designs. I also dreamt about the possibility of a stitch regulator! When it became possible for me to start looking for this dream machine, I traveled across the state to try out various machines. I positively KNEW that I had found the machine for me when I got a chance to see a HQ Sixteen with a HQ Pro-Stitcher demonstrated. I was able to make the transition from my old set-up to the HQ Sixteen on a Professional Frame and QuilTable with ease. The ProStitcher, while different from the computer system I had used in the past, was not so different that many of the tasks felt almost intuitive. As per my past history, I have not attended any classes or seminars. I have just about every video that HQ has put out in an attempt to learn the machine. And, due to my recent history of having to spend months in a wheel chair recovering from some orthopedic surgery, I am reacquainting myself with my machine and HQ Pro-Stitcher. I am so happy to be able to be back on my feet, back at my frame and learning something new each and every time I finish a quilt. I love my HQ Sixteen with the HQ Pro-Stitcher!